Craig Easton: "You want me to send you a picture so you can rip it to shreds on your blog?"

Sometime last year I wrote a couple of posts about the vast numbers of pictures we see and instantly forget.I called this visual detritus photographic musak and how few pictures we remember. I was focussing on the commercial dreck you see, but  it should be made clear there is a photobook version of it too, and a gallery version - you know, the stuff you try hard to like and are supposed to be interested in, but which just gets you nodding off whenever you look at it. Sometimes when something looks boring it is because it is boring. It doesn't became less boring because it is a serious photograph, in fact that might make it more boring. Please  if you see something boring, say it how it is. It's boring.

And similarly if something seems trite, it is probably because it is trite. It doesn't matter how pretty and well-lit and beautifully printed it is, it is trite. Please, if you see something trite, say it how it is. It's trite.

And every so often you get pictures like the one above that somehow stick in your craw like a splinter of a bone from a Morrison's Basics pack of chicken legs and thighs. It leaves you spluttering into your morning tea, chucking up your cornflakes and puffing out your cheeks like an unreconstructed Colonel Blimp.

That's what this Heathrow ad did to me. I saw it in the Independent and was outraged (this was one of those times when I was in the mood to be easily outraged. It comes and goes). The picture is of the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. It's my favourite bridge in the world. I used to live very close to it, I used to walk over it and drop stones into the river below and, in the days before they put a fence up to stop people throwing themselves in (not always successfully - here's a tragic tale from earlier this week), watch make tiny splashes as they hit the mud below. I never tired of that.

I walked over that bridge and got the best city view in Britain, in one of the most stunning natural settings. And I'd go down Nightingale Valley and walk under it and marvel at the spectacle of forest, cliff, forest and the mud of the River Avon.

And whenever anyone came to visit, I'd inflict the bridge on them and tell them all about how it was built,  the competition to design it, the ridiculous designs that didn't get built, Brunel's winning design, the delays in its construction and the gory technicalities of how you die when you jump from the bridge.

I still go there on a regular basis when I visit Bristol. In the summers, I'll take in the views from the terrace of the Avon Gorge Hotel (where Cary Grant used to stay when he visited his mum in Bristol), and if anyone from out of town comes, That's one of the classic tourist views and it's gorgeous. You see the bridge at its level with the trees of Leigh Woods in the background.

Another classic tourist view of the bridge is from the lookout point at the end of the harbour. Here you are at ground level and  you get the bridge in the middle with Leigh Woods on the left and the Georgian/Regency architecture of clifton Village rising on the right. You can almost see Martin Parr's house in this view.

And there's another phenomenal  tourist view just above the bridge. It's the one where you look down and get South Bristol (home of Photobook Bristol) sinking into the background,

That's pretty much the spot where this picture is supposed to look like it was taken from, but it's not quite right. That's why I coughed, choked and spluttered and got into all of a tizzy when I first saw it. Where's the fence, where are the bushes, why have different pictures been spliced together, what's with the lighting, why is there an oversized paper plane, and who the fuck is Paul Brown and what do I care.

. I was befuddled by some notion of visual accuracy mixing with my infantile romanticised vision of the bridge. There was a clash that could not be resolved. In a similar infantile manner, I wanted my photography to be true and here was this advertisement that was a lie. All of a sudden what was real mattered.

And that's why I remembered the picture. It struck a chord. And that's what it was supposed to do (though maybe not quite in that way).

I wanted to blog on it but couldn't find the cutting, probably because I didn't make a cutting. I thought I'd find it on the internet. But I didn't. So I didn't write about it.

Then last week, I went to Liverpool and I met Craig Easton. Craig used to work for the Indepenedent when the Independent was the top UK newspaper for photography. He still does documentary work, but he makes his money from commercial work. So I was chatting to him and the conversation went something like this.

Craig: Yes, I do commercial work mostly.

Me: Great stuff. Who do you work for?

Craig: Oh, Landrover, Barclays. I've just finished a campaign for Heathrow.

Me: Heathrow?

Craig: Yes, we shot landmarks all around the country.

Me: You didn't do that picture of the guy with the paper plane at the Clifton Suspension Bridge did you!

Craig: Yeah, that's one of mine. 

Me: I fucking hate that picture. 

Craig: Oh, that wasn't the reaction that I was really hoping for.

Me; But it's a good thing. At least I remembered it. Can you send me a copy so I can write about it on my blog?

Craig: You want me to send you a picture so you can rip it to shreds on your blog?

Me: Yeah, that's about it. 

Craig: Ok, sure, why not?


Which I think is fantastic!




More images from the campaign here.

Craig Easton's review of Liverpool Look/15

Craig Easton's main site including his ongoing project on Fish Wives

There will be a short rest on the blog as I attend to other matters.

Liverpool Look/15: Don't Take Boring Pictures

There is some really great work on show in Liverpool at Look/15 Festival. Most important historically is Alice Seeley Harris's pictures from the Congo. These are a benchmark of early campaigning photography that show the brutalities of  a region that was effectively turned into a private slave labour camp for the King of Belgium.

This is what is says on the website of the  International Slavery Museum , the place where the show is being held.

Alice Seeley Harris' photographs revealed to the world the shocking truth of exploitation, murder and slavery in the Congo. The campaign gained public and political attention through the Harris Lantern Slide Show that toured Europe and the US. These shows were accompanied with powerful narrations which attempted to stir the audiences' sense of duty and responsibility, and can be seen as a significant milestone in shifting public perceptions on the impact of colonial rule in the Congo.  

Seeley Harris used one of the world’s first portable cameras, a Kodak Brownie, to take images of both Congolese life as well as 'atrocity photographs' used in one if the first human rights campaigns. In 1905, Mark Twain published King Leopold's Soliloquy, an imagined set of musings in which Leopold cited the "incorruptible Kodak" camera as the only witness he had encountered in his long career that he could not bribe. 

From the International Slavery Museum, it was a short walk to Open Eye where Richard Ross's Juvenile In Justice project showed pictures of  the imprisonment of children in the USA was a breath-taking reminder of the power of documentary that tells a story in the most direct manner possible. Sometimes you wonder if the most noticeable effect of the conceptualisation of photography is to remind us of the essential pointlessness and impotence of that conceptualisation. Rather than circling around an issue introspectivelywondering at the process, the promulgation and the involvement of self in the story, Russell gets to the heart of the matter with very simple pictures that combine with short captions that are heartbreaking in their peeling back the heartbreak, sorrow and fear that children, parents (and prison guards) experience in the American Justice system.

There were so many sad stories in there, but the one I remember most was that of a child who was sitting in a holding cell waiting for his mother to get him out, but she couldn't leave her job for fear of losing it. So he had to sit and wait

picture by Richard Ross

I’m waiting for my mom to come get me. Is she in there? She’s at work today. I want to go home. I got in trouble at school today. —R.T., age 10 Jan Evans Juvenile Justice Center, Reno, Nevada. R.T. was brought in from school by a policeman. He stabbed a schoolmate, but it is unclear what the tool was, a pencil, knife, fork . . . He was waiting to be picked up by his mom, who couldn’t come get him until she got off work for fear of losing her job. He was checked on every five minutes. The director of the facility recalled an eight-year-old being brought in for taking a bagel and stated, “This is not the place for these offenses.”

Look 15 does have a theme. Actually it has 3 themes and they are big ones; Women, Migration and Memory. That's two themes too many, but even with the three themes it's difficult to see where the Ross fits. Maybe it would be better just to have Look as an unthemed 'Month of Photography' kind of event, or make a choice and have a real focus and curate it that way. Because otherwise you're left guessing how things fit together, when actually they don't fit together at all. 

The big show in town is Martin Parr and Tony Ray Jones in Only in England at the Walker Art Gallery. It's familiar work but great to see the beautiful, beautiful prints and the link between the history of the British holiday and American street photography. 

And of course you get the great Tony Ray-Jones Photography Checklist and its top tip, Don't Take Boring Pictures. 

Indeed! Which brings us to the last and best of Liverpool Look/15, Max Pinckers' Will They Sing like Raindrops or Leave me Thirsty at St George's Hall. Now I'm biased with this because I love the book and Tadhg Devlin, who curated the show on a really small budget is a good friend. 

But really! Max Pinckers doesn't take boring pictures. Well, he probably does take loads of them, but they're not the ones we get to see. We get to see exciting pictures of horses, lovers, the city and the sea.



If you're not familiar with Max Pinckers' work, here's my review of the book from which the show came. But even though I love the book, it was fantastic to see the prints blown up close to the size they deserve and wonderfully printed by McCoy Wynne. The show was a mix of the simple and the complex - simple because it told the story of the book in a pared down, economical manner with an emphasis on the visual grandeur of Pinckers' staged documentary, but complex because of the range of print sizes, papers and pairings. 

The only shame was the show was barely signposted so only the most dedicated viewer is going to find it. The lack of signposting was a bit of an issue this year (and a real contrast to Format where there were signs and lovely people always available to point the way). And though it was great for Liverpool to host Pinckers' first UK show, he really deserves a couple of floors somewhere with fabulous light and brilliant signposting and food, music and dance to complete the Bollywood fantasy/reality theming. It will happen but I'm surprised it hasn't happened yet.